The debate about global climate change is effectively done with society slowly acknowledging our dramatic impact on the environment. At both the international and national level there are increased efforts to identify innovations or create new regulations to help us decrease our carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions.

As society, policy-makers, and regulators begin to look at ways to curb carbon emissions they will quickly begin to pay greater attention to the impact information communication technologies (ICT) has on energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Consider a few of the amazing impacts of our Internet Economy:

-ICT Produces as Much of a Carbon Footprint as Aviation: As mentioned in a number of previous signals on X2, the ICT industry collectively produces as much carbon worldwide as does the Aviation industry.[1] What isn't often talked about is in the last two years Aviation has reduced their footprint 15% while the ICT industry has effectively doubled theirs![2]

-Racks Consume as Much Power as a House: A single rack of computers in a machine room consumes approximately as much energy as one household. This means that a modern machine room of hundreds if not thousands of racks can be thought of as having the energy demand as a small city. Nicholas Carr has done some interesting analysis that shows that the average energy consumption for an avatar in second-life is more then real humans consume on a daily basis. [3]

-Data Centers Are Operationally Challenged: Increasing use of our information infrastructure has led to a proliferation of data centers and put increased demands on the data centers already in existence. This year over 50% of data centers are anticipated to have insufficient energy and cooling to meet their operational needs.[4]

Paradoxically, this same infrastructure is also a powerful potential green enabler allowing us to tackle the challenges posed by global change.

Consider the positive:

-Technology Can Enable Virtual Commerce, Intelligent Transportation, Etc: By 2012, application of ICT to other sectors of the economy (e-trade, transportation, etc) will contribute to a reduction of 68 million tons of CO2 in Japan. This reduction is roughly equivalent to about 6% of the CO2 produced by the nation in 1990.[5]

-Telepresence Reduces the Need For Face2Face Meetings: Cisco's Telepresence units have been deployed in 191 cities. In the last year 85,854 telepresence meetings were held resulting the the elimination of 13,450 face to face meetings. The environmental impact from this shift is the equivalent of taking 6,775 cars off the road.[6]

Conclusion?
It is unclear at this point which of the sides of our technological double edge sword society will understand first. If ICT positions itself as an enabler for innovation in dealing with global climate change we see a second wave of the Internet economy fueled by efforts to create more sustainable and efficient infrastructure. However, if regulators begin to look for ways to quickly deal with imposed caps for greenhouse gas reductions, ICT may find itself the new target of substantial regulation.

[1]"An Inefficient Truth", Global Action Plan, 2008, http://www.globalactionplan.org.uk/event_detail.aspx?eid=2696e0e0-28fe-4121-bd36-3670c02eda49[2] Rich Lechner, Vice President for Green Initiatives, IBM, August 28, 2008
[3] "Avatars Consume As Much Electricity as Brazilians", Nicholas Carr, ROUGH TYPE, December 05, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/avatars_consume.php
[4] North American Network Operators Group, 2007, http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0802/levy.html
[5] Dr Yuri Inoue, International Telecommunications Union,
[6] Cisco, March 22, 2008